The Global Environmental and Occupational Health (GEOHealth) project supported by the Fogarty International Centre, US National Institutes of Health, is a partnership between the Public Health Foundation of India and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

HSPH Faculty

Lindsey Jaacks

Brent Coull

Rafael Irizarry

David Hunter

Francine Laden

Donna Spiegelman

Glorian Sorensen

Wish Vishwanath

Lisa Berkman

Subu Subramanian

Wafaie Fawzi

Frank Hu

Vishal Vaidya

Objectives

The project aims to accelerate scientific infrastructure development, enhance capacity, and support research needed to fully characterize the relationship between air pollution and cardio-metabolic (CM) risk factors and diseases in India. The project also aims to build a critical core of environmental health researchers in India that will help develop the evidence base for health-centric policy-making across sectors moving forward.

Research

Aim 1: Estimate air pollution exposure in Chennai and New Delhi.

Aim 2: Estimate the association between exposure to air pollution, temperature, CM risk factors, and CM diseases, and characterize susceptibility to these risk factors and diseases.

Aim 4: Estimate the association between ambient exposure to air pollution and blood vitamin D levels in Chennai and New Delhi.

Capacity Building

Short Term Training Courses in India

Mentored Opportunities at HSPH

Masters Level Training Program at HSPH

Research and Insights

Rapid urbanization has given India some of the world’s worst air pollution, a factor implicated in the deaths of more than 620,000 Indians each year.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Delhi’s air is the most polluted in the world.

Recent findings by the WHO, which examined pollution levels in nearly 1,600 cities in 91 countries for the years 2008 to 2013, show that the annual mean fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration in Delhi was 153 μg/m3, far exceeding the WHO-recommended annual mean of <10 μg/m3.

Urban living can affect a person’s risk of CM disease in many different ways. In addition to increasing exposure to air pollution, a known risk factor, it often affects the major potentially modifiable drivers of CM risk factors, including tobacco use, occupation, alcohol use, obesity, physical inactivity, and unhealthy diet.

An emerging body of evidence indicates a link between many of these factors—specifically obesity, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, and air pollution—and the built environment. The WHO recently cited exposure to outdoor air pollution (6th) and physical inactivity (11th) among the top 15 risk factors for the global burden of disease in South Asian countries.

What we do

Developing a model to estimate ambient exposure to Ambient Air Pollution (AAP) and health outcomes in Chennai and Delhi, India.